Porto - The Pipa

Porto - The Pipa

Porto's best table sits above the port wine lodges in Gaia. Its most interesting bar is in Bonfim. And the pipa — the 550-litre oak barrel that defines an entire...
The Hood Test
The hood is the first component of a travel jacket to be tested in actual weather. It concentrates the whole design problem into its smallest form, from seam sealing at... Read more...
Minimum State
Every product in a travel kit spends most of its time not being used. We designed the Canard range from that state outward, asking what each object becomes when it... Read more...
The Working Surface
A travel notebook built around one insight: the rigid cover is not packaging but infrastructure, the portable writing surface that removes the need to find one. Read more...
The Double Brief
The engineering decisions behind a compact umbrella built for both rain and UV exposure: fibreglass ribs, carbon joints, and what a DWR rPET canopy with UPF50+ protection actually does. Read more...
Standard Issue
Most carry goods buckles come from two manufacturers. The question of which one, and why, is where the design brief either started or stopped. Read more...
The Half Layer
What the number in a jacket's layer count actually means, and why 2.5-layer construction is the right choice for a jacket built around travel. Read more...
The Clean Line
How a product is joined shapes what it communicates. We look at bonded and heat-welded seam construction in technical outerwear, and why the absence of thread is a design decision... Read more...
Three Rolls
A roll-top closure is not a waterproofing feature. It is a position on how a bag will be used — and the decisions inside that choice run from fold geometry... Read more...
Below the Spec
Most carry goods spec sheets give you a single number, total empty weight. What they rarely show is how much of it is hardware, and why that distinction matters. Read more...
The Film Between
Dyneema Composite Fabric is fifteen times stronger than steel by weight and fully waterproof. It also delaminates at crease points under sustained use. Here is the honest account of both. Read more...
What Stays
The wax in a well-used canvas bag never fully cures. It keeps migrating, darkening the creases, recording how the bag was carried. That process is a material property, not a... Read more...
Without the Membrane
Before membranes, there was a cotton fabric so tightly woven that its own fibers solved the waterproofing problem. A look at etaProof cotton, the makers who still use it, and... Read more...